Here are five products that stood out to Jason Cipriani and me this year. Jason Perlow: The speed of Wi-Fi 6, which is also referred to as 802.11ax, is not the only significant advancement of the new high-speed wireless networking standard. It’s also security, in the form of WPA3, which is a requirement of all Wi-Fi 6 equipment when they are certified. WPA3 is a major improvement over WPA2 in current routers because it uses a new authentication mechanism, known as SAE or Simultaneous Authentication of Equals to replace the PSK or Pre-Shared-Key in WPA2, which is a much more secure key exchange method. It makes it much more difficult for an attacker to record the session’s encrypted transmission and then play it back offline to attempt to crack it. Some existing Wi-Fi5/802.11ac routers support WPA3 experimentally now, so if you can turn it on and you have products that support it, such as any iOS 13 or iOS 14, or any Android later than 10 or even Windows 10 2004, you can use that protocol. Foldable phones are indeed in our future, and Samsung is currently leading the way. Jason Perlow: So I am not a folding phone user yet because these things are just too darned expensive right now. However, I think Samsung is making some critical innovations in the space. It looks like Samsung managed to address most of the previous model’s issues, including any performance and usability compromises it had. It is making progress, and for that, it should be recognized. Jason Perlow: So, look, Apple has been ahead of the game with its iPhone cameras since last year’s 11 Pro Max; it completely blew away anything Samsung or Google had. The only vendor it was on par or possibly even behind was Huawei, and frankly, it isn’t even in the picture right now. So, it’s safe to say, if you are someone where photography is paramount for you in a mobile device, the iPhone 12 Pro Max is your only logical choice. What the company is doing with its microprocessors and machine learning is astounding for computational photography. Which brings us to… I think about the approach Microsoft is taking with the Surface Pro X, easing into the ARM switch in public, through a beta… and then I look at what Apple did, making the entire transition behind closed doors and releasing it on day one, ready to go. Man, it’s impressive. Everyone else in the computer industry is so far behind right now. Jason Perlow: I don’t know where to begin with how amazed I am by this thing. I hate to start playing Apple word bingo, but that chip is astounding and magical. Cupertino put a tremendous amount of resources into it. Apple was able to take a processor architecture that was once only reserved for low power, mobile devices, and smartphone-types of application workloads and transform it into the future of desktop computing. Everyone needs to notice this because we all thought it would take a long time before Arm chips were on parity with Intel. We have seen with this hybrid SoC architecture from Apple a much more optimized chip for modern workloads. It is much more efficient with memory and power use and can run apps not only just as fast as Intel, but run them even faster depending on what they are and how the code is built. The open-source machine learning benchmarks on the chip using TensorFlow are off the scale, and even Arm Windows virtualized and emulated runs faster than what Microsoft’s Surface Pro X can do with the Qualcomm SQ2 chip. Hopefully, the success of the M1 encourages processor designers such as Nvidia, which now owns Arm, to create other Arm-based desktop-grade processors that are licensable. And, potentially, there are also RISC designs such as OpenPower and RISC-V that are open source that pave the way for future non-Intel chips in the datacenter or even on the desktop, too. This year, our choice for the best Mac for the money is, without doubt, the 2020 M1 Mac Mini.
